Improve Your Organization With Learning-Focused Leadership

4 tips to follow

With today’s ever-changing technological advances in the workplace, employees must learn new skills to adapt to new innovations. Business processes can change quickly, so organizations must figure out the most efficient way to upskill and reskill their workforce. For larger organizations, sometimes waiting for human resources (HR) and learning and development (L&D) decision-makers to put these training is not the best option.  
 

Rather than depending on others, it’s proven that leaders themselves who take on learning can help strengthen and build their team’s overall business impact and ROI with just a few easy steps. Overall, leaders who build a culture of learning and a practice of learning can promote adaptability and education as a core competency for a positive impact on an organization’s success. A learning-focused leadership ecosystem can be easily attained by embracing failure routinely and encouraging debate and dissent.
 
Here are four best practices for leaders interested in creating an environment of learning in their organization.

This concept provides a chance to learn from your mistakes. It’s important to embrace and even celebrate failure as it can provide a valuable learning experience. If leaders allow for constructive observations of the failure to be discussed and strategies developed to fix problems for the next relevant event, the failure or mistake has at least one positive outcome. Instead of discounting those objectives that didn’t work, take time to sit down with employees, examine what went wrong and determine what that suggests. This doesn’t mean that people cannot be held accountable, but, as a leader, your team will begin to see excusable failures as promoting forward-thinking innovations and good risk-taking that may not have worked the first time, and staff will be encouraged to keep trying.

This concept contributes to building a culture of learning and allows any employee, regardless of rank or role, to share thoughts without fear of an idea being dismissed. When ideas can be proactively debated, with a leader as a moderator, teams will welcome the associated individual growth and overall team learning. Team members will feel comfortable in discussing and engaging in matters together, which allows them to contribute more intentionally, thus delivering on their full potential.

This concept will help measure learning success and align all departments. While most leaders appreciate and value on-the-job learning, they don’t always take responsibility for learning themselves. Leaders should take charge and can begin with building a learning agenda comprised of a team strategy that outlines all major priorities. Leaders can work directly with each department to identify what skills or skill refreshments are needed to reach their objectives. Include personal development goals in addition to team aspirations. This may be a bit time consuming, but it will provide a comprehensive learning agenda tied to your strategy. Once compiled, share the agenda with L&D and HR personnel if you can and ask for them to partner with you in helping your team meet their goals. Regularly check back on the agenda and determine whether progress is being made and goals are being met. Create milestones within your agenda so teams know where they stand to achieve individual, team and organizational success.

Diversify learning beyond traditional classroom instruction by implementing performance adjacent learning. This is a nonlinear approach to education, where learning occurs during and in the course of work. It is continuous, seamless and integrated to meet the most relevant challenges and needs of both teams and individuals. According to O’Reilly online platform behavior, which explored the unique learning activities of 195,000 learners across a range of industries, 42 percent of learning activities were conducted in a performance adjacent manner. It’s clear that performance adjacent learning is a valuable and efficient way for workers to learn at the point of need. Leaders today can help encourage this kind of continuous, integrated learning by advocating for or providing solutions that support it and measuring and rewarding those that engage.
 
Learning-focused leadership can improve your organization, and the willingness to share learning processes, skills and experiences will benefit and develop your team. Don’t be afraid to team up with L&D and HR managers within your organization, but make staff aware that you are leading the way in establishing both a learning culture and a practice of learning on your team. As a leader, your enthusiasm and willingness to be involved, along with seeing and recognizing learning-related achievements and results has a direct impact on your company’s success.
 

Karen Hebert-Maccaro, Ph.D. is presently Chief Content Officer of O’Reilly Media, Inc. where she is a key member of the executive management team, responsible for leading and managing the organization’s content and learning strategy. In this capacity, she oversees the development of learning initiatives and programs for Safari, O'Reilly's learning and training platform, manages both creation and curation of available content, and directs the internal editorial teams in acquisition, development, and delivery of content and products for learning, training, and events. She additionally oversees the relationship and execution strategy for academic markets. As a practitioner, educator, researcher, and consultant she has developed extensive expertise in the areas of talent management, leadership development, influence and change management, and innovative pedagogical design. Visit www.oreilly.com Connect Karen Hebert-Maccaro